That would be great. Be sure to let me know how much water you used....that seems to be one thing that most of the writeups don't mention.

Your strike/dough in water, is every last drop of water that you will put in the whole batch. Its all the water that would normally go in at strike, all the water for any infusions and all that water that would normally be used to sparge. ALL of it. As an example. in this batch we were looking for a pre-boil volume of 27.3 litres (7.2 gallons) and were using 6.45kg (14.2lb) of grain. So accounting for absorption by the grain, our total water needed was 35litres (9.25gal) and thats how much we mashed in with. The Full Volume.

For a while, I did a modified version of Brew-in-a-bag. I mashed in a 5 gallon pot with a paint strainer bag. After the mash, I dunked the strainer bag with the grains in another pot as a sparge. I then combined the two and brought it to a boil. This was for 3 gallon all-grain batches. However, it is a nice way for extract brewers to try all grain brewing since the only additional equipment they would need is a paint strainer bag. The technique is essentially the same as the one outlined here at HBT.

That would be great. Be sure to let me know how much water you used....that seems to be one thing that most of the writeups don't mention.

Your strike/dough in water, is every last drop of water that you will put in the whole batch. Its all the water that would normally go in at strike, all the water for any infusions and all that water that would normally be used to sparge. ALL of it. As an example. in this batch we were looking for a pre-boil volume of 27.3 litres (7.2 gallons) and were using 6.45kg (14.2lb) of grain. So accounting for absorption by the grain, our total water needed was 35litres (9.25gal) and thats how much we mashed in with. The Full Volume.

I have brewed 2 batches using the BIAB and have used about 1 gallon less water than what beersmith said and then my pre boil volume come out right because you don't have all the dead spaces to worry about, and I crush my grains finer than usual because you don't have to worry about a stuck sparge.

I did it once for a 3-gallon stove-top batch for our club's strange brew competition. It worked fine, was fun to try, and I might do it again for small or experimental batches. I got much lower efficiency than I do when I batch sparge - 60-65% vs. 80-85%. I used the same kind of paint strainer bag that I use as a hop bag in my brew kettle. The trickiest parts were stirring at mash-in, and removing the bag at the end of the mash without making a big mess in the kitchen.

I did it once for a 3-gallon stove-top batch for our club's strange brew competition. It worked fine, was fun to try, and I might do it again for small or experimental batches. I got much lower efficiency than I do when I batch sparge - 60-65% vs. 80-85%. I used the same kind of paint strainer bag that I use as a hop bag in my brew kettle. The trickiest parts were stirring at mash-in, and removing the bag at the end of the mash without making a big mess in the kitchen.

That is actually one of the reasons I went ahead and built a 5 gallon mashtun for my 3 gallon batches. When using a paint strainer bag with a stovetop mash, I would make a big mess moving the paint strainer bag to another pot to sparge. Dumping out the grains was also a mess. Since I brew in my kitchen, I also didn't like having grains flying around there since they are covered in bacteria and wild yeasts that can cause infection.

The other reason is that the pot lost too much heat during the mash. I would usually need to heat it up again in the middle. Now I usually lose less than a degree with my cooler mash tun.